Three Times Dana Scully Didn't Go to San Diego for Christmas
by Audrey Roget
Summary: Emily/Christmas Carol didn't have to happen. Mild warning for brief references to domestic violence.


Three Times Dana Scully Didn't Go to San Diego for Christmas

by Audrey Roget

Author's notes: References to Redux I/II, Detour, and The Postmodern Prometheus.

This story was written for pukajen and first posted to the livejournal community xf_santa. While many M/S shippers romanticize the Christmas Carol/Emily episodes in S5, their placement in the overarching timeline of the show has always been a problem for me. The heart-breaking melodrama follows so quickly on the resolution of the cancer arc, it feels like too heavy a burden for Scully to be expected to carry. So I've given Scully three alternate scenarios for the Christmas of '97.

* * *

1

"One-oh-one point eight," Mulder announced. "I think it's official, Scully, you have the flu. Now, _my_ gut tells me -"

Scully groaned, and not just at his rotten pun.

" - you won't be drinking eggnog with your brother this time tomorrow."

"Oh, god, Mulder, don't say eggnog," she whimpered.

He reached out from his perch at the edge of the mattress to rub slow circles over her abdomen. "Sorry. Chicken soup?"

"Not unless you want to see the effects of retro peristalsis on a matzo ball." Mulder tamped down a wave of sympathetic nausea. She brushed her hand over his. "Just…just keep doing that."

Arriving earlier that morning to give Scully a ride to the airport, he'd panicked at the retching sounds coming from her bathroom. Mulder had spent too many months of the past year pretending not to hear those sounds through thin motel walls. By sheer force of denial, he'd willed himself not to think about what they meant. And until she collapsed before a panel of their superiors, he'd mostly respected her insistence that they speak of her cancer as little as possible.

"You want me to call your mother and tell her you're sick?" he offered, dreading her answer.

Scully's drooping eyes widened suddenly. Mulder's hand stilled. He supposed that she was as dubious of him delivering such news, however benign in this case, as he was. From now on, a simple message like that would always carry the weight of the past.

"No, thanks," she rumbled, letting him off the hook. Scully gave his hand a quick squeeze and nestled back into the pillows, letting her eyes drift shut. "They're not expecting me until tonight. I'll get some rest first and call her this afternoon."

Mulder resumed his gentle rubbing. She sighed audibly and seemed to melt under his caress. After all of the helpless hours he'd spent at her bedside - just weeks ago, really - this simple connection reassured him. A mundane bout of the flu, he mused, opened her to his care in a way that even facilitating her remission had not.

Scully's breathing deepened and slowed, her light snore cutting through the mid-morning quiet. Mulder smiled slightly to himself and leaned over to press a kiss to her feverish forehead. He drew the comforter up over Scully's shoulder before heading out to the living room to call in a sick day of his own. She might change her mind about the soup, he figured, and he had Jerry Springer to keep him company in the meantime.

2

The shelter bustles with families in high spirits, despite the circumstances that have brought them here. By two o'clock, the first seating of Christmas dinner is under way, and soon the 20 or so mothers and their children will be invited to "shop" the community closet for second-hand but serviceable winter clothes.

Scully spent the morning in the clinic, where she mainly dispensed baby Tylenol and vapo-rub. The cranky cold sufferers troubled her less than the ones who sat passively as she checked up on their fading bruises and knitting bones. Father McCue's suggestion that she honor the miracle of remission by volunteering at the church's domestic violence shelter has renewed her awe of God's grace. Helping out there a few hours a month lets her feel that she is making a difference she never could working for the FBI. It has also re-honed the thirst for justice that led her to the Bureau in the first place.

The comforting fellowship-hall smells of apple pie and institutional coffee float into the closet, where she sorts through a pile of donated shoes and boots. A girl with bright eyes, around ten years old, Scully guesses, helps her match them into pairs and line them up by size.

"Shouldn't you be digging into some sweet potatoes and turkey about now, Lia?" Scully asks.

"We're s'posed to have supper and open presents later," the girl says, "right now, it's just families with babies and little-little kids."

"Well, it's nice of you to help out in the meantime."

Lia shrugs. "I already finished my book, and I didn't feel like messing around with the other kids, so Mama told Father McCue I needed a job."

"Idle hands…" Scully begins the priest's favorite platitude.

"…are the devil's playground," Lia finishes, and they conspire on a grin.

"How come you're here on Christmas, Doctor Dana? Don't you have a family?"

Scully tries out her simple, rehearsed answer: "My family's celebrating out in California this year."

"Don't you miss your mama and daddy?"

"I'll see my mother when she comes back to Baltimore next week." She hesitates. "My father died. A few years ago around Christmas, actually."

"Bet Christmastime makes you sad, huh?"

Scully considers. "A little. Not so much anymore." Compared to other losses and near-losses since then, death by natural causes, even before retirement age, seems less traumatic.

"I miss having my daddy around, but he scared me bad sometimes," Lia says quietly.

Scully learned during a check-up with the girl's mother that the ex-husband has been sentenced to a dozen years on drugs and weapons charges, and threatened the woman's life over her testimony. Scully understands that sense of ever-present dread, and the drive to struggle for everyday normalcy in the face of it. She's been handed a reprieve, too, maybe just as temporary as this woman's. At what later cost, she doesn't dare speculate.

Scully gently lays a hand on the girl's shoulder. "I'm sorry to hear that. But you're safe here." _For now_, she does not add.

But Lia's perceptive, and Scully can tell she's finished the sentence for herself.

Sister Gabriella's clogs can be heard clumping around the corner. The nun is wearing a red baseball cap with cartoonish antlers sticking out the sides, which appears when she pokes her head into the closet to prod, "We're about to start, ladies."

Lia jumps to her feet from where she's been kneeling on the floor and brushes the dust from her tights.

"Thanks for your help, Lia." Scully wants to offer something more, something comforting and upbeat - to ease Lia's mind or her own, she's not sure which - but only comes up with, "Merry Christmas" and a loose hug.

Sensing the sister's impatience, the girl breaks away. "You're welcome," she calls, not looking back as she trots back to the main room.

Scully follows. Some of the shelter children stream toward the front of the hall to assemble with the church's cherub choir. Scully spots Lia standing tall in the back row. She asked Dr. Zuckerman about miracles not so long ago. Scully got hers. As sweet treble voices launch into "Away in a Manger," she offers up a quick prayer that the families here will find mercy, too.

3

Scully cried out as her body seized and shook, light and color exploding behind her eyes. Her partner had given her the tongue-lashing of a lifetime, and now he was buried inside her. Arms and legs locked around him, she felt his heart pounding as pleasure surged and sang between them.

Thank God her flight had been canceled.

Spent, they separated and retreated to opposite corners to recover. For long moments, their raspy, panting breaths were the only sounds in the room. Scully ran back the last forty minutes in her mind: Thanking Mulder when he arrived to take her to the airport. Getting an alert from the airline that a blizzard roaring through the Midwest had grounded her cross-country flight. Offering Mulder a cup of coffee and feeling secretly unburdened. The warmth of Mulder's body coming up behind her while she reached into the cupboard for a pair of mugs. The sound of porcelain crashing onto the floor when she freed her hands to stroke his shoulders, hips, abdomen as he kissed her senseless. Then a blur of skin, heat, whispers and wails.

Plastered to the mattress, Scully rolled her head toward the foot of the bed, where Mulder had collapsed. "What…was _that_?"

"That, Scully, was completion, fulfillment, _consummation_," declared Mulder, his face erupting into a toothy, goofy grin.

She licked her lips, savoring the lingering taste of his skin. "Completion of?"

He tilted his head smugly. "Your weak-ass attempt at seduction back in Florida."

"I was trying to be subtle!" she huffed.

"Hey, no offense. My moves have been just as lame."

"Apparently even my weak-ass moves are pretty intimidating," she threw back. "A little wine and cheese, and you practically leave skid marks on your way out the door to chase after forest monsters."

Probably taking her recognition that the creatures were, in fact, very real as a win, he went on with the argument at hand. "I don't recall you picking up the gauntlet after I pulled you onto the dance floor a few weeks ago."

Scully hoisted herself up and crawled through the tangle of sheets to crouch over him. "All right, that was a decent opening," she allowed. "But I was waiting for the follow-through, Mulder. I thought you'd finally found your sugar plums."

"Yeah, well you seemed to have no trouble finding them today. Honed right in on 'em, actually." His fingers skated over her spine.

"They're hard to miss, G-man." Scully batted her eyes.

Mulder snorted appreciatively. "Oh, well played, Miss Scully, well played."

She giggled and held on tight as he dove upward for a kiss and rolled her under him again.


End file.
